Haggling

I've always been leery of handing out money. And by that I don't mean helping out a friend or family member. I expect that a certain level of responsibility is inherent if one has to work for one's money. That's not to

Step One

So, I did the phone interview this evening. It was short - less than twenty minutes - and was just technical questions. I admitted up front that I wouldn't succeed with any of the complexity analysis problems, but he insisted on asking them anyway - probably just to

Idiots

I added some new RSS feeds to my iPhone application (this is a work project), and when I tried to view one of those feeds, the program died - an uncaught exception - something about accessing an index of an array beyond its bounds. Hmm. Objective-C is a wonderful language,

Interview

I just got a call from an in-house recruiter for one of the top five social networking sites. Unlike most job calls I get, this person was well spoken and seemingly intelligent. That's definitely a good start. The company sounds interesting enough. It looks like it would be

I Love Being a Programmer

I love being a programmer. Not to generalize too much, I'll just make the claims for myself. Typically the technologies that are fresh in my head are only those that pertain to my current job. The others fall by the wayside, although they're usually easily resurrected.

I Was Wrong

It happens. It turns out that libxml2 supports something pretty similar to what I had in mind. Instead of providing the SAX parser with a get-more-input-data callback, it has a "push" mechanism whereby one gives it data as it becomes available instead of buffering and providing data as

Message Parsing

So, I have this 2nd job that I do in the evenings, at home. At the moment I'm implementing this fairly poorly documented binary protocol that is used for serializing data structures. I have an example message that I managed to tear out of the also-poorly-documented transport protocol,

Streaming SAX Parser

So, I need a SAX parser. There are lots of those - so, no big deal there. But I also need a *streaming* SAX parser. That is, I need to be able to feed the parser data as I receive it. The platform in question has slow network access with

Two Weeks Later

Two weeks into this project and there isn't a single defined feature or a single piece of data to work with. Most projects at least have the decency to start out well, and only after a while of building up your hope, turn to floundering and ultimately being

I'm Going Back!

I've been talking with a couple people I met on my Rainier trip and they want to go up McKinley. So, the three of us our planning a May, 2009 McKinley expedition - sans the guide company. RMI is great and all, but they charge around $5,200